I need some help with something in Blender.
I have bought a couple of books over the past several years (Blender Foundations The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6, by Roland Hess) and (Blender for Dummies by Jason van Gumster) to help me learn this program.
I cannot find the answer to this question anywhere in either book or by simply experimenting with the program and attempting to figure this out myself.
I first noticed a lack of my understanding of how this particular aspect of the program works while attempting to render a jpg of all my files created with blender. I have accumulated quite a few different files practicing with this program and when I simply look at the names of the files cannot remember what was in the file since I have been creating blender files for at least 4 years now. By setting up my folders in a Windows operating system where the exact title of the jpg file is next to the blender file from where the render came I get a visual view of what is in that Blender file using the View Large Thumbnails option . This helps a lot to locate different created objects since a file title is sometimes confusing and my memory cannot go back through a hundred or so files.
So here is where the problem develops. Some of my Blender files were saved without any cameras and the objects could be anywhere out there in the space. To enable a render of the blender file I need to get the objects within the camera view. With some of the files after adding a new camera, I notice that when I enter Numpad 0 key I’ll see the object whizz by as if it is way out there somewhere and nothing appears within the rectangular shaped area that always displays your rendered scene. In ortho or perspective mode Numpad 5 the object will be visible.
I have attempted within the properties panel to change the X,Y, and Z locations that are located within the Transform option for the camera and object, setting them both to the same location for bearing yet this does not seem to work.
When I start off a file using the default startup screen the camera and object have a specific location that always appear within the boundaries of the rendered area, so I tried to recreate these same XYZ settings in the file I am attempting to adjust yet the transform settings do not seem to be the correct way of adjusting the camera and object for pinpoint relocation within the rendered scene. Many of these files were created in the process of learning following books where the default factory setting of the camera were deleted and I need to add a new camera to get some sort of rendering of the mesh modeled object.
What am I doing wrong here, and how does one get control of all their objects created by pulling then into the render rectangular shaped area of the camera accessed by NumPad 0 for setting according to your preference? Is there a coordinates XYZ meter somewhere to do this or the only way like pulling teeth and with a mouse dragging everything around into place.